This invention relates to insulation displacement connectors.
Insulation displacement connectors are known in which two conductor wires are connected together in an insulating housing structure by the use of conductors having insulation displacing terminals at one or each end. In such structures, there may normally be a housing and a cap is screwed down into the housing to connect one or both of the insulation displacement terminals to an individual conductor wire so as to connect, for instance, a customer's service to a central office. The cap is normally provided with a pair of wires aligned with one of the invention displacement terminals and the other insulation displacement terminal is aligned with another pair of wires. Examples of known structures of this type are described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,652,071 granted Mar. 24, 1987 in the name of G. Debortoli, et al and U.S. Pat. No. 4,741,480 in the name of P. Despault, et al granted May 3, 1988.
In use of this type of structure, overvoltage and overcurrent protection is also provided by surge devices which are placed electrically in series with the insulation displacement connector. Problems are inherent with such an arrangement in that the overvoltage and overcurrent protection devices are connected to conductor wiring by binding posts which are extremely difficult to protect from the environment and corrosion of the binding post terminations may result. This may lead to breakages in electrical connection through the overvoltage and overcurrent protection devices which is a well known phenomenon.
The present invention seeks to minimize or avoid the above problem.